ETFs are a collective grouping of securities where valuable knowledge at the extremes of opportunity or disaster is washed out into an average.

The previous financial crisis was precipitated by a trend where perceived value broke from reality. Then it was mortgage backed securities (MBS) breaking the link from a banker's knowledge of his customer and local real estate conditions and substituting it for a financial rating agency's grade. One could posit that today's market decline and impending crisis will be identified as coming from electronically traded funds (ETF) which break the link from an investors knowledge of an individual security and substitutes it with a description of a collective grouping, an index, of securities where valuable knowledge at the extremes of opportunity or disaster is washed out into an average.
Luring Investors into even Narrower Niches reports on a trend to a particularly wrongheaded assumption that results are enhanced  by focused rather than scatter shot investments in a new and upcoming field such as robotics.  What is the investor's hurry? Buying early into a group of companies dissipates the advantage of having bought early and inexpensively by mixing a possible winner among outright going out of business failures especially when time and analysis can cull out the losers and direct you to a real chance of finding the winner.
   

Can Connecticut afford The Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD)?

Reason Magazine listed as one of the five worst decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, Kelo v. The City of New London, where the court approved the city’s use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another to further a developers idea for economic development. Pfizer, for whom the project was proposed, unfortunately for New London’s progress and the Supreme Court’s reputation exited from the deal made to make the hardship endured by Kelo and other property owners into a cleared waterfront now used as the city’s dump. Leaving well enough alone was the better course for economic development and it’s a lesson the DECD can never learn because of its mandate to meddle. And it continued. In 2015 they proposed to help move with a $100 million tax credit mega rich hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from its plush campus in Westport to a Stamford waterfront development. Thankfully Stamford residents rejected the project because it already had suitable buildings near its rail center and were not as concerned about the fund's chief yacht access. Talk about steal from the poor and give to the rich mind benders these economic development agencies go on.